I read your post about fast vpns and everything makes sense, but which servers did you use? The distance between your location and the servers might be a significant aspect in determining the actual speeds. The distance the data packets have to travel can result in delayed response or increased ping times. If you place that as well in your post, it will be very helpful. As a reader, more info will available to make a solid choice. I have used various VPN services in the past, and have referred to your website for suggestion. The list seems appropriate but adding that suggested info can be really beneficial. Cheers!

IPVanish is a top pick, especially for Kodi and torrenting, due to excellent speeds, zero logging and extensive privacy tools. It’s ultra fast on local connections but less consistent internationally across a network that’s mid-sized for locations but super-sized for servers and IP addresses. Netflix is working but iPlayer is currently blocked, which is a shame as it’s otherwise fantastic for streaming.
If you’re an online gamer who uses a VPN to access another region’s servers (or because you got IP banned), the most important factor in choosing a VPN is latency. The ping time between the game servers and your computer or console is mostly what determines how much lag you’ll experience. If you want to stay competitive, figure out where the game’s regional servers are hosted and choose the nearest VPN server.
Latency: This is closely tied to proximity, but is also affected by the amount of traffic on the networks between you and the VPN server. Latency measures the time it takes to send and receive a request from a server, also called ping time. Many VPN apps will allow you to see which server offer the least latency, usually measured in milliseconds. If not, you can connect to the server and use a terminal or command prompt to ping a website and view the time.
Hello Fedir, there are many ways you could make your VPN faster. When you want to stream movies, download songs, and play games, while at the same time do not want to compromise on speed, you better connect to a nearby server. If you’re using a VPN at home, you can connect to a wired internet connection and chucking Wi-Fi away. You can experiment with changing your protocol. Hope these tips will help you make your VPN faster.
Max Eddy is a Software Analyst, taking a critical eye to Android apps and security services. He's also PCMag's foremost authority on weather stations and digital scrapbooking software. When not polishing his tinfoil hat or plumbing the depths of the Dark Web, he can be found working to discern the 100 Best Android Apps. Prior to PCMag, Max wrote... See Full Bio

Latency: This is closely tied to proximity, but is also affected by the amount of traffic on the networks between you and the VPN server. Latency measures the time it takes to send and receive a request from a server, also called ping time. Many VPN apps will allow you to see which server offer the least latency, usually measured in milliseconds. If not, you can connect to the server and use a terminal or command prompt to ping a website and view the time.

Some VPNs offer great service or pricing but little to no insight into who exactly is handling them. We considered feedback from security experts, including the information security team at The New York Times (parent company of Wirecutter), about whether you could trust even the most appealing VPN if the company wasn’t willing to disclose who stood behind it. After careful consideration, we decided we’d rather give up other positives—like faster speeds or extra convenience features—if it meant knowing who led or owned the company providing our connections. Given the explosion of companies offering VPN services and the trivial nature of setting one up as a scam, having a public-facing leadership team—especially one with a long history of actively fighting for online privacy and security—is the most concrete way a company can build trust.
TunnelBear is the undisputed best free VPN service available today. It's a serious VPN that's serious about customer satisfaction, privacy and security. So the upside is that you're getting a VPN that works, and can be trusted not to hold loads of data on you and sell you out at the earliest opportunity! The downside is that the free tier of TunnelBear only gets you 500MB bandwidth each month. That means for many people having it always-on will leave you caught short well before the end of the month, and absolutely rules out using it to stream endless episodes of Rick and Morty on Netflix. The free VPN tear at TunnelBear is certainly designed as a gateway to the paid tier which offers unlimited data but will cost you real money. If you're going to pay for a VPN we'd suggest getting a premium one like Express, but if you're only interested in a free option then TunnelBear is the one for you unless you need loads of bandwidth.
With the increasing use of VPNs, many have started deploying VPN connectivity on routers for additional security and encryption of data transmission by using various cryptographic techniques.[33] Home users usually deploy VPNs on their routers to protect devices, such as smart TVs or gaming consoles, which are not supported by native VPN clients. Supported devices are not restricted to those capable of running a VPN client.[34]
While it hides your IP address, a VPN is not a true anonymization service. For that, you'll want to access the Tor network, which will almost certainly slow down your connection. While a VPN tunnels your web traffic to a VPN server, Tor bounces around your traffic through several volunteer nodes making it much, much harder to track. Using Tor also grants access to hidden Dark Web sites, which a VPN simply cannot do. That said, some services, such as NordVPN, offer Tor access on specific servers. IVPN offers a similar feature called multi-hop VPN, which lets you route your web traffic in tricky ways.
Logging Policy – PIA has never been involved in any privacy exposure incident. Moreover, the privacy policy of the company is very clearly defined, which serves to increase user confidence in the reliability of the VPN. PIA clearly mentions that they follow a no-log policy and the fact that they have a clean slate in this regard makes PIA one of the best VPN services for privacy-seeking individuals.

ExpressVPN earns a spot on our list thanks to its feature-filled service that is easy to use for both technical and non-technical users. ExpressVPN consistently ranks as one of the fastest VPN providers in our official BestVPN Speed Test. This makes it a fantastic option for streaming HD content. Robust encryption keeps hackers at bay and no usage logs means the company can’t share your personal browsing data. With servers in plenty of countries around the world, “stealth” servers to help users in China bypass the firewall, and Smart Domain Name System (DNS) service that keeps streaming sites like Netflix running smoothly, you can see why ExpressVPN continues to impress our experts and remains one of our most popular VPN providers. Try ExpressVPN today with a 30-day, no-quibble, money-back guarantee.

We didn’t find any problems when we tested other aspects of TorGuard’s performance. Each time we checked our location via IP address, it accurately resolved to the location of a TorGuard server. Neither our true IP address nor our location was exposed when we tested for DNS leaks and IPv6 leaks. TorGuard runs its own DNS servers—a requirement for all the VPNs we tested—so the routing that happens when you go to a website isn’t released to your ISP, Google, or anyone else. And since TorGuard doesn’t support IPv6, the app disables it completely, just like IVPN.

Our Findings: During our VPN speed test, we have switched in between different ExpressVPN servers to determine the latency; however, UK was the one we tested several times. We noticed that despite choosing a distant location, ExpressVPN servers manage to deliver fast VPN speed, and the drop was not more than 15%, which is normal. Also, we didn’t experience any connection interruption throughout the test phase. It clearly states that ExpressVPN’s server are smartly optimized to give best streaming experience for Netflix, Hulu, HBO, BBC iPlayer and other media websites.

So our advice is to not use a free VPN unless it really is for occasional, very casual use. For the odd IP-hopping use case, they can work. But if you're planning on using the VPN a lot and for streaming video etc we'd highly recommend going for one of the overall best VPN services - they're not free but they're also pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things.

Speed Test – The Internet is only as good as how fast it operates. I recently conducted a research where I tested 15 popular VPN providers for speed, using different servers in major countries. The speed you get on the Internet from a VPN is almost always lesser than what you would get without it. This is simply a result of the way VPNs work. However, the leading VPN services only cause a small reduction in VPN speeds, not more than 30% of your usual connection speed. Thus, speed is one of the main criteria I used to evaluate VPNs here.
Like ProtonVPN, the VPN service built in to the Opera web browser gives you an unlimited amount of free data per month. But its network download and upload speeds were awful (download speeds were 3 percent of the baseline speed), and it's not even a real VPN; it's just a browser-specific encrypted proxy service. (The OperaVPN mobile apps no longer work.)
RADIUS can respond to authentication requests based on its own user account database, or it can be a front end to another database server, such as a Structured Query Language (SQL) server or a Windows domain controller (DC). The DC can be located on the same computer as the RADIUS server or elsewhere. In addition, a RADIUS server can act as a proxy client to a remote RADIUS server.
One popular technology to accomplish these goals is a VPN (virtual private network). A VPN is a private network that uses a public network (usually the Internet) to connect remote sites or users together. The VPN uses "virtual" connections routed through the Internet from the business's private network to the remote site or employee. By using a VPN, businesses ensure security -- anyone intercepting the encrypted data can't read it.
The best VPNs offer a solid balance of features, server location, connectivity protocols, and price. Some are great for occasional use, others are geared towards getting around the location restrictions companies put on their apps and services, and others are targeted at people who do heavy downloading and want a little privacy while they do it. Here’s what you should look for.
TorGuard offers applications for every major platform, including Windows, macOS, and Android. And unlike our top pick, it also supports OpenVPN on ChromeOS. (Though TorGuard does offer an iOS app, it doesn’t natively support the OpenVPN protocol that allows for the easiest and most reliable secure connections.) Using these apps, you can manually select a server, click Connect, and not worry about the rest. But otherwise, the applications aren’t as refined or easy to use as IVPN’s. New users are likely to find themselves out of their depth when modifying anything but the most basic functions, such as auto-connecting at launch or minimizing the app.
CyberGhost is one of the most feature-rich VPNs with special configurations for different use cases, including media streaming, downloads, anti-censorship and safe browsing. Ultimately designed to optimize your connection, this turned out to be quite irrelevant when looking at the download speed, which came out lowest across all testing tools, with an average speed of 2.47 Mb per second.
While a VPN can aid privacy and anonymity, I wouldn’t recommend fomenting the next great political revolution by relying solely on a VPN. Some security experts argue that a commercial VPN is better than a free proxy such as the TOR network for political activity, but a VPN is only part of the solution. To become an internet phantom (or as close as you can realistically get to one), it takes a lot more than a $7 monthly subscription to a VPN.
It's not just the bad guys who are watching your traffic. Congress, for example, has granted internet service providers the right to sell anonymized metadata about your activities online. That's unfortunate, for a number of reasons. Fortunately, a VPN makes it much harder for even your ISP to monitor your activity and helps keep your privacy in your hands.
The world wide web is a massive place that allows you to connect with people from all over the world. Unfortunately, there are people out there who use valuable technology to steal information and use it for their own profit. Fortunately, we can help with our free VPN service. Don’t remain vulnerable to any potential attacks from thieves. Our services are fast, reliable, and free to use.
IPSec NAT-T enables IPSec peers to negotiate and communicate when they are behind a NAT. To use IPSec NAT-T, both the remote access VPN client and the remote access VPN server must support IPSec NAT-T. IPSec NAT-T is supported by the Windows Server 2003 Microsoft L2TP/IPSec VPN Client and by the L2TP/IPSec NAT-T Update for Windows XP and the L2TP/IPSec NAT-T Update for Windows 2000. During the IPSec negotiation process, IPSec NAT-T-capable peers automatically determine whether both the initiating IPSec peer (typically a client computer) and responding IPSec peer (typically a server) can perform IPSec NAT-T. In addition, IPSec NAT-T-capable peers automatically determine if there are any NATs in the path between them. If both of these conditions are true, the peers automatically use IPSec NAT-T to send IPSec-protected traffic.
In addition to hiding your online activity from a snooping government it’s also useful for hiding your activity from a snooping Internet Service Provider (ISP). If your ISP likes to throttle your connection based on content (tanking your file downloads and/or streaming video speeds in the process) a VPN completely eliminates that problem as all your traffic is traveling to a single point through the encrypted tunnel and your ISP remains ignorant of what kind of traffic it is.

We spent more than 130 hours researching 32 VPN services, testing 12, interviewing the leadership of five, and consulting information security and legal experts. We found that a VPN shouldn’t be your first step toward online security, but for protecting your info on public Wi-Fi (and in some other cases), IVPN is the most trustworthy provider that offers fast, secure connections and easy setup.

While a VPN can protect your privacy online, you might still want to take the additional step of avoiding paying for one using a credit card, for moral or security reasons. Several VPN services now accept anonymous payment methods such Bitcoin, and some even accept retailer gift cards. Both of these transactions is about as close as you can get to paying with cash for something online. That Starbucks gift card may be better spent on secure web browsing than a mediocre-at-best latte.